[GAP Forum] GAP 4.11.1 release announcement

[Max Horn]

Dear GAP Users,

The next release of GAP, version 4.11.1, is now available at

   https://www.gap-system.org/Releases/4.11.1.html

This is a minor release, which only contains bug fixes and minor tweaks. You can find an overview of these changes at

  https://github.com/gap-system/gap/blob/stable-4.11/CHANGES.md


The GAP 4.11.1 distribution contains 151 packages, of which 49 have been updated since GAP 4.11.0. A full list of which packages were updated can be found in `CHANGES.md`. Notable changes include extending the Transitive Groups Library with representatives for all transitive permutation groups of degree at most 47 (due to Derek Holt), and fixing the ordering of groups of orders 3^7, 5^7, 7^7, 11^7 in the Small Groups Library. For other changes, we refer to the documentation of the various packages. 


We encourage all users to upgrade to GAP 4.11.1. You can download source archives from 

   https://www.gap-system.org/Releases/4.11.1.html

For Windows 10 users, we recommend using it with the help of WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). We also hope to be able to again offer a binary installer for Windows in the coming weeks. However, this is not yet completely certain. The reason for this is that the efforts required to produce the Windows installer has become a problem. It was one of the reasons for delays in GAP releases -- e.g. this release was originally scheduled for mid 2020. 

To address the delays in GAP releases, we have switched to a completely new release process, which is simpler and easier for us to maintain. We also completely revamped the technical underpinnings of our website, which also makes it much easier to improve it. And we decided to give up on delaying releases until a Windows installer can be prepared.

On the upside, this all means we should be able to make GAP releases with far less effort, and thus more frequently. Also, a better and improved Windows installer is in the works, which hopefully will also be easier to prepare, so that we may even be able to return to providing Windows installers as part of the release process.

If you need any help or would like to report any problems, please do not hesitate to contact us at support at gap-system.org, or submit new issues on GitHub: 

   https://github.com/gap-system/gap/issues

There is also a 'gap' tag for questions about GAP at the Mathematics Q&A site:

   https://math.stackexchange.com/tags/gap/info

In addition, you may find some GAP related news on Twitter:

   https://twitter.com/gap_system


Best regards
Max Horn
on behalf of the GAP Group